The most moving and poignant part of the day is the memorial siren. At 10am for
two minutes everything stops. The traffic on the busiest streets stands still
with the drivers standing on the road next to their vehicles. The pedestrians in
the street become statues. The lights change from green to red and back to
green again but no one notices. There is an eerie silence. You feel the weight
of remembering on your shoulders. You try to remember harder. Most of us today
weren't even born then - but still we remember.

17 comments:

That must have been very moving - the same eerie silence we experience on Armistice Day.

In Berlin we visited the Holocaust memorial and I found it very striking; yet it was also a happy place as young children ran in between the huge slabs of concrete which look a bit like lots of rows of dominoes.

Thanks for your comment Trish. I know what you mean about a happy place as I feel this a bit at the memorial sights in Israel. I'm not sure that German children (although they should be happy and I wish them no harm) playing on a Holocaust Memorial in Berlin would conjure up the same symbolism of the continuing generations though.

Very moving and poignant. My fathers father witnessed the harrowing sight of seeing thousands of dead Jews when they went into the concentration camps when the war ended. This has to be remembered and never forgotten - a reminder of what the darker recesses of the huamn psyche is capabale of so that it is never repeated again, although it has.

I have often heard what a shock it was for the liberators when they entered the camps. There are many stories of kindness from this time after all the years of cruelty during the war. A small gestures were remembered by survivors as very big deals.

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At the age of 46 and four years after I started the IVF process, I brought home my beautiful DD. This a blog about a woman for whom not being a mother was unacceptable. Add to the mix that I'm also an Expat, Jewish, British, Israeli (sort of), Single, a Teacher, a Writer, a Homemaker, and you have Midlife Singlemum.

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